Edifice
by Seta Suzume
Summary: There is nothing that is not effaced by time.  One day even Fran will die.   A significantly post-canon story about Fran.


**Edifice**

a FFXII fic, by Suzume.

Quietly, calmly, even gracefully, the boy thought. Fran was dying. He could barely believe it was real. He had known Fran his entire life. Even if those mere thirteen years couldn't be considered long, they were still an eternity to Pio. Technically, it was longer than that, since he had "known" Fran before he was born. And his father (and aunts and uncles) had known Fran that long too. And his grandfather (and presumably his siblings). And his great-grandfather. And his great-great grandfather, but not since birth. And maybe his great-great-great-grandfather had known her too, but Pio wasn't completely sure about that or if, at least, it hadn't been that long. Fran was wise and beautiful and eternal. A goddess. Or so Pio had always thought.

_"I will not live to bury you."_

Pio remembered these, her enigmatic words to him on the occasion of his tenth birthday, whispered over a sloppy slice of carrot cake, shared between only the two of them- Pio and Fran. Mother was engaged in the kitchen, trying to wash the plates and calm Aunt Lisia's wailing infant daughter. There were no other guests to the rotting tenement on this mildly festive day. He was certain he had heard her properly. Her accent was exotic, but her enunciation was precise and left little room for doubt. Pio had learned to understand her well, fearful from a young age to ask her to repeat herself. She might well do so, but he had always felt Fran's time too important and her words too precious to waste in the asking.

If Father had still been among the living, Pio might have shared this secret with him. However, without that option, he was forced to keep these words to himself. Mother would not understand, though he was certain she would try. As for everyone else he knew, he was entirely sure they would not. Fran and her ways were beyond the ken of the simple people that surrounded him. She was a goddess. And Father had been her priest. Perhaps that meant he had passed the role down to Pio. If that were true, the boy would be forced to admit he was tending to the role rather poorly.

"Fran, why are you dying?" Pio asked, his olive face propped up by his hand as sat, leaning against her lounge chair.

Her dark skin glowed as it soaked up the rays of the strong Rozarrian sun. "Once," Fran had told him, "This land was known by the name of 'Dalmasca.'" She had been thinking of the past. He supposed it was a past that meant something to her personally, rather than a past she merely knew of, from the deep look in her inscrutable eyes. "Of course," she had brushed away her own rare sentimentality, "Before that name it bore another. And ere that, yet another, as lands are wont to do, as long as there exist peoples to name them."

For all that she seemed to Pio as old as time itself, for all that she was much longer lived than any hume, for a viera, her age was not extraordinary. Her life might even have been cut somewhat shorter by her experiences away from the Wood. She had leapt, with heart and curiosity, into the dance and the freewheeling world had done as it does to all peoples- doing its utmost to prick her, body and soul, full of holes. From time to time she had been truly wounded (as far as physical ills were concerned, the _Bahamut_ came to mind), but she was strong, stronger than a hume, and she healed up and stood up again and went on living. That, Fran believed, was how life was meant to be lived.

"Because I am old," she told the inquisitive boy at last, sucking in the warm air with her lips just as every pore of her skin drew the in energy of the sun. She was like a plant now, wasn't she? Kept living by the power of that fierce and tender light. For the sun, Fran felt, there was nowhere like Dalmasca. And in Dalmasca, nowhere like Rabanastre.

"But, Fran, you've always been old," Pio protested. It wasn't like he hadn't known people who had died from old age before, but he had seen them age. He had seen them decline. Fran neither visibly aged nor declined. If Pio analyzed her every way of being as hard as he could, all he could come up with was, perhaps, a hint of slowness. Slowing down wasn't enough to kill anybody. ...Was it?

Fran did not laugh (rarely did she laugh), but she smiled. Pio remembered death. Fran was radiant. He could see Grandfather's sunken cheeks, Uncle Isidore's eyes swollen shut, Lisabeth's pock marks. No one could die looking so beautiful, surrounded in heavenly light.

Then again, he reconsidered, this was Fran. Fran wasn't like other people. She was beyond time. She was beyond the bland rules of everyday society in northern Rozarria. She was a goddess. ...Right? And he, Pio, was her priest. The go-between for this goddess and the world.

Her smile was amused and knowing. She could roughly imagine what he was thinking. Her mind was sharp and her memory not dulled, even by age. She could still recall those long ago days when she would not have understood his way of thinking. She had come a long way in her understanding of humes since she first left the shelter of the overprotective Wood.

She had learned. In some ways, an ancient tree was not all that different from a beautiful and equally-aged building. Balthier had shown her that, though he might not have been aware of it at the time. He had been teaching her, each and every day they were together, at the same time as she had been teaching him. It was what people did. Hume or viera, bangaa or moogle or garif or seeq. Like the branches of a tree, each one growing out of another. Like the bricks making up a building, each resting on- relying on- the support of the ones below. All people teach one another. All people support one another.

Pio might see her as unearthly- more like a tree than a hume (he had never known any other viera), but even a tree required more than the sun's attentions to grow and flourish.

It was a time before she realized Pio was still there, sitting very silently. It had seemed a small, fleeting moment of reflection to Fran, but from the way the sun had altered its position, she knew it had been long enough a stretch to feel enormous to the boy. She turned to look into his gray-green eyes. She did not speak. No matter how much time she spent around humes, she would never share their over-fondness for speech. If Balthier had not been able to instill that bad habit it her, even if she lived beyond today, she knew it would never come.

Other humes had changed her, but none had done so as Balthier had.

"How long?" Pio asked. To face her, he was forced to turn towards the sun and he squinted slightly. He had not inherited the weakness of sight that had run so long through this branch of the family.

She cocked her head slightly. "Until I die?"

He nodded, breathless. "Death" was a difficult word for him to say, though he had seen his fill of it already, despite his young age. It was because they were close. And because he was, innately, wisely, somewhat afraid.

"It will be soon enough yet," she appraised him of the situation. Death was not something that brought Fran any fear. She could not recall any time when it had. No, that was untrue. She could not recall any time when the idea of _her own_ death brought fear into her heart. Fear for the death of _others_, though. That had been different.

Pio struggled to find the right words to say, pushing fear and sorrow, love and responsibility all into their proper places in his heart. He was quite green yet to life, Fran thought. A new shoot sprouting forth from the old tree. That was why humes spoke of "family trees," she supposed. There was something of wisdom in that.

"Is...is there anything I can do for you?" His hands were fists now, tight and anxious, fingers flexing with nervous energy.

"Yes..." she said slowly as the idea came to her, "You can. There is little green here, Pio." He shivered at the sound of her name on his lips. Names were powerful, Fran had always told him. She did not say names often or uselessly. The way she used them made him even more sure- his name, at least when it came from Fran, was a dreadfully powerful spell. "Go out and bring me back a branch."

"Any kind?"

"Any bearing verdant leaves. I would like to see one last reminder of the Wood before I die."

"Uh-huh," he nodded vigorously, jumping to his feet. "I'll do it!" He rushed off, a blur of motion and desire. He had his ancestor's confidence (if true confidence it had ever been and not mere posturing). However, there seemed to be little of the viera in him. Pio Nam Bunansa, her great-great grandson. What had he inherited from her?


End file.
